Summary: Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, talks about writing all proxy addresses and user names to a CSV file by using Windows PowerShell.
Hey, Scripting Guy! Yesterday’s blog post, Export User Names and Proxy Addresses to CSV File, showed me an easy way to get a couple of proxy addresses from Active Directory, but all users do not consistently have only one or two addresses. Some users have as many as four or five. I want to know exactly how many I have, and I need to know all of the addresses. Can you help?
—PQ
Hello PQ,
Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, is here. Well, it has not gotten any cooler today down here in Charlotte, North Carolina. But the evenings are not too bad after the sun goes down. The mornings are actually quite nice right before the sun comes up. I am trying to figure out a way to do the siesta thing down here, but for some strange reason I cannot catch on. Bummer—it is a great idea.
I decided to break down and write a script to solve this issue. I probably could have done it in a one-liner, but it begins to get too complicated, convoluted, and cumbersome. In the end, many times a simple script is much better than a very hard to read one-liner…at least in my mind.
Gather the users information
The first thing I do is gather together all of the user names with which I want to work. I make sure to pick up the ProxyAddresses attribute because it is not selected by default. I store all of the returned user objects in a variable named $users. This line of script is showne here:
$users = Get-ADUser -Filter * -SearchBase 'ou=testou,dc=iammred,dc=net' -Properties proxyaddresses
Walk through the users
I need to walk through my collection of users. I do this by using the Foreach language statement. Inside the loop, I will use $u to refer to a specific user. This script is shown here:
Foreach ($u in $users)
{
Now I create an ordered dictionary object. This is a new feature in Windows PowerShell 3.0. It acts like a hash table, except that it is ordered. The key to success is that [ordered] MUST appear right in front of the @ symbol. In addition, I need to completely delete the variable after I am done using it. If I cast the ordered dictionary to a hash table, I lose the ordered attribute. There is no way to specify how I am going to order the dictionary object—it does it by maintaining the order in which the items become added to the dictionary. Here, I create the ordered dictionary object, and then I add the user name to it:
$proxyAddress = [ordered]@{}
$proxyAddress.add("User",$u.name)
I want to add all of the proxy addresses. To do this, I use the Count property from the array of ProxyAddresses, and I use the For statement to count actions for each of the addresses. I then use the Add method to add the ProxyAddresses values to a new field named after the order of ProxyAddress. This section of script is shown here:
For ($i = 0; $i -le $u.proxyaddresses.count; $i++)
{
$proxyAddress.add("ProxyAddress_$i",$u.proxyaddresses[$i])
} #end for
I cast the ordered dictionary to a PSCustomObject, and then I pipe it to the Export-CSV cmdlet. The key here is to remember to use the –NoTypeInformation switch or the newly created CSV file will not display properly in Microsoft Excel (due to the entrenched type information). Now I remove the variable. This is shown here:
[pscustomobject]$proxyAddress |
Export-Csv -Path c:\fso\proxyaddresses.csv -NoTypeInformation –Append -Force
Remove-Variable -Name proxyAddress } #end foreach
The last thing I do in my script is use Invoke-Item to open the CSV file. By default, this opens in Excel— that for my purposes is fine. The following image illustrates the newly created Excel spreadsheet:
PQ, that is all there is to using Windows PowerShell to display all proxy address values. Join me tomorrow when I will talk about more cool Windows PowerShell stuff.
I invite you to follow me on Twitter and Facebook. If you have any questions, send email to me at scripter@microsoft.com, or post your questions on the Official Scripting Guys Forum. See you tomorrow. Until then, peace.
Ed Wilson, Microsoft Scripting Guy